As turbulent a country as ever, Egypt, in the last six years, has seen an uprising topple a dictator, the election of a Muslim Brotherhood leader to power, and finally a coup that brought a former general/ defence minister into office. When Barack Obama came to Washington in 2009, he promised a “reboot” in relations […]
It’s safe to say that Leipzig’s rich musical tradition cannot be matched by any other city in Germany. This is where Johann Sebastian Bach was employed as a choirmaster and composed the St. Matthew’s Passion, where Robert Schumann wrote the Spring Symphony, where Richard Wagner was born and where Felix Mendelssohn lived and worked. Leipzig, […]
Yossi Sucary calls it the “unspoken Holocaust.” Sucary, an Israeli academic and author, is referring to the little-known fact that the Jews of Libya were among the six million victims of the Holocaust. Jews in Israel and the Diaspora generally assume that only European Jews were caught up in the Holocaust, but this assumption is […]
Francois Ozon’s romantic drama, Frantz, moves between national borders seamlessly. Languidly unfolding in Germany and France in 1919, a year after the end of World War I, it’s based on Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 movie, Broken Lullaby. Scheduled to open in Canadian theatres on April 7, Ozon’s spare and affecting film is at once sweet and bitter. […]
Congratulations, Chrystia Freeland. You’ve won. You and your handlers not only buried a legitimate news story, but convinced a compliant media, a cowed Jewish leadership and a spineless Jewish press to ignore it, as if it never even existed. I’m referring, of course, to the short-lived Freeland affair, which broke in Canada several weeks ago. […]
It was 18 days that shook the Middle East. The autocrat who had ruled Egypt for nearly three decades was gone, ousted by a popular uprising that was part of the larger upheaval in the Middle East known as the Arab Spring. So it appeared at the time. But six years later, it now seems […]
There have been a flurry of reports in the Canadian media of late that mosques in Montreal and Toronto have been used as platforms to disseminate antisemitism. Muslim organizations have denounced the imams who’ve delivered these noxious sermons, but their denunciations will mean precious little if mosques continue to serve as venues of anti-Jewish diatribes. The […]
Probably the most infamous American gangster of all time, Alphonse (Al) Capone maintains an iron grip on the popular imagination. Seventy years after his death, Capone’s mystique seems undimmed and indestructible, even though his tempestuous reign lasted only six years. Celebrated and cursed in a cascade of books and movies and in a tsunami of […]
Bassem Youssef was the Jon Stewart of Egypt, a whip smart comedian who skewered authority and promoted the tenets of democracy in a country accustomed to authoritarian rule by despots. From 2011 to 2013, he hosted The Show, closely modelled after Stewart’s The Daily Show. A former heart surgeon, he was immensely successful, his nightly […]
It has been obvious, to some at least, that Israel’s protracted and bloody conflict with the Palestinians can best be resolved by means of a two-state solution. This would necessitate the creation of a Palestinian state in areas where Palestinians form a vast majority of the population, namely the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. […]